Getting ready for eBay

I’m at the point where I’m going to be dragged kick­ing and scream­ing into sell­ing my lam­p­work on eBay.? I’ve tried the Annealer Bou­tique for six months or so, and in that time I have sold one item.? It’s not just me, either; other lam­p­work­ers have indi­cated that it’s just not work­ing for them either.? As for doing shows, well, I don’t mind doing one once in a while, but I cer­tainly can’t make a con­stant thing of that.

So it looks like eBay it is, despite all the neg­a­tives — eBay/PayPal being seller-unfriendly in a lot of ways, includ­ing rather high fees and restric­tive poli­cies; the bargain-hunter men­tal­ity of the typ­i­cal eBay buyer; the com­pe­ti­tion not only from so many other arti­san lam­p­work­ers but from the importers a la Austin Hamil­ton as well; the dif­fi­culty of get­ting seen/known/recognized in among all the other merchandise.

Last night I did a lit­tle research, and ended up set­ting up an Auc­tiva account (sort of putting the cart before the horse there; I don’t yet have my eBay seller’s account quite yet!).? I don’t under­stand why more sell­ers don’t use it, since it seems to give you some real ben­e­fits at no cost.? Set­ting up the var­i­ous pro­files was non-trivial, but it wasn’t as bad as set­ting up all that infor­ma­tion from scratch would be.? We’ll see how it works for real in short order.

Prob­a­bly the biggest irri­tant I see cur­rently is that I don’t see how to use my exist­ing mer­chant account in con­junc­tion with either eBay or Auc­tiva.? There should be a way…but I haven’t found it.? I already have a very sat­is­fac­tory setup, and see no rea­son to use any­thing else (espe­cially Pay­Pal with their dis­gust­ing ripoff-level fees, so much higher than what I would oth­er­wise pay).

I guess next is to set up the seller account, get a cou­ple of decent pic­tures of SOMETHING, and dip my toe­sies in the cesspool…